In between writing poetry and studying Latin, French, algebra, history, and English, my friends and I talked incessantly and laughed mightily. Much of our homework was done on the Ninety-sixth Street crosstown bus, which carried us to and from school. I usually wrote out a Latin translation that the others copied, or communally we solved a problem in geometry. The bus driver on our route was a handsome Norse blond whom we dubbed Chico (from the movie Seventh Heaven) and promptly fell in love with. He was very tolerant of our antics, even when we spilled a whole bottle of ink on the floor of his crowded bus or blocked the exit while we loudly recounted some confidential tale.
The exuberance that characterized my school life was not quite duplicated at home. The pattern of my life had begun to change. My brother had married and left home. As a result, I now had two rooms to call my own, and I happily converted one of them into a study. Less happily, my father had suffered two strokes—one very minor, the other graver, affecting his walking. He sold out his business and spent his time at home reading all the books he had not read earlier—sets of Scott and Thackeray especially. My mother’s older sister moved nearby and spent most of the day with us. She was what the nineteenth century would have dismissed as a “superfluous” woman—my maiden Aunt Annie, tall, thin, with carroty hair, who worried incessantly about me, carried my boots to school if it rained after I had left, and altogether lived a vicarious life. I rebelled constantly against her interference. Egoist Stern never thought of Aunt Annie’s side of anything—only of how her limited life impinged upon my own.
The subtler problems resulting from such a home life never occurred to me. My mother held everything together with strength and wisdom, and I still believed that, despite my father’s condition, my world revolved about “the one most likely to become famous.”
Leona NINETEEN TWENTY-TWO WAS AN important year for me. I graduated from P.S. 28 with a high award—a copy of Lights to Literature, inscribed to me by the principal—but was denied a formal presentation of the book at commencement because we were leaving the country to meet my father in Germany. He had now completed his courses in dermatology there, and we were to vacation en famille. Vacation meant shopping to my mother, and since the mark had fallen she was able to acquire Dresden china, beautiful hand-embroidered linen, and outfits for her offspring. Despite Junior’s violent protestations, Daddy selected a morose green suit with a bilious matching overcoat for him. For me, my mother chose several poplin dresses adorned with tatting and embroidery, along with a large brown felt hat with an upturned brim. From my personal savings I bought a black fountain pen whose ink had to be pumped up and occasionally spilled over. Nevertheless, already fancying myself a writer, I was thrilled to own my first fountain pen.
When we returned home Junior immediately discarded his morose green suit, saying to my father, “Do you think I’m a Hun? I wouldn’t be seen dead in school in this lousy outfit.” For his birthday in late September he was given a gay plaid suit from Rogers Peet, an appropriate costume for a senior at Evander Childs High School.
As for me, I was about to become a freshman at the same high school. According to the New York City Board of Education, I could not attend the main building of that institution, although I lived exactly six blocks from it. All freshmen were assigned to the annex. The annex was in Wakefield. Even my father, whose practice had led him all over the Bronx, was unfamiliar with Wakefield. Its precise location would, as it turned out, remain forever unknown.
Attired in my blue poplin dress with matching socks and my brown felt hat, I set out for my first journey to Wakefield and my first day in high school. My costume was adorned with my new fountain pen, now suspended from a black ribbon around my neck. Following instructions from a family friend, I boarded the Webster Avenue streetcar, knowing that eventually I must transfer somewhere but not knowing precisely the spot. After an hour I asked the conductor. “You shoulda gotten out at 189th Street. You gotta go back there and take the crosstown.” Nervously I awaited the return trolley. A lady eyed me sympathetically and asked me where I was going. “I want to get the 189th Street cross town.” “There is no such crosstown, honey.” “But I must get to Wakefield,” I answered. She had never heard of Wakefield and suggested that I return to Webster and Tremont and start all over again. Three hours had now passed. I was worn, hot, and utterly dejected. I took off my heavy brown felt hat and noticed that my blue poplin dress was spattered with black ink. My beautiful pen had leaked over my new dress. I arrived at long last at Tremont and Webster, walked up the hill, and finally was back home. “I missed my first day in school,” I said, sobbing violently. Daddy immediately flew into a rage. “Those Idioten! To send a little girl to that verdammte place when she could walk easily to school! What Dummheit!”
The next day Daddy himself paid a visit to the main building of Evander Childs High School, six blocks from home. I never received a report of the comments he made there, but he was informed that if his daughter took German she could attend school in the main building. After his jubilant return he remarked to my mother, “Imagine! They suggested that Leonchen should take German. What other language should she take?”
Apprised of my admission to his building, Junior remarked, “Listen, kid, if you see me there, you don’t know me.” At a later date, long after I had recovered from my aborted trip to Wakefield, I spied my brother in conversation with his physics teacher. I went up and shyly said, “Hello, A.” After a few seconds he condescendingly looked down at me, smiled at his teacher, and, as if excusing himself, said, in an abashed way, “The kid sister—what can I do?”
My so-called home room or official room during my freshman year was also home to the baseball team. These were the heroes of the school and they paid little attention to the small shy child Leona. A few of the baseball gods also attended my German class. There, when the teacher, Miss Ackerle, called upon me, I did not respond. When she called upon me a second time, the team pitcher nudged me: “She wants you!” I had not connected my new title—“Miss Rostenberg”—with “little Leona.”
The disparity between elementary school and high school was enormous. Here I was, small, unaggressive, nurtured, a child in socks and short skirts, suddenly being addressed as Miss. My contemporaries seemed sophisticates, girls who used makeup and flirted with boys, women of the world. Many of these “sophisticates” lived in the recently built apartments along Creston Avenue. The neighborhood “fields” were beginning to vanish.
My first year in high school was lonely. I made no friends. I enjoyed few courses and utterly detested some. I loathed geometry, and my mother’s consolation—“My little girl has a literary mind”—helped not at all when my math teacher, Miss Morley, announced, “The lowest grade goes to Miss Rostenberg.” Amazingly enough, I had the temerity to report her public denunciation of me to the administrative assistant, who interceded on my behalf. The persistent Miss Morley insisted upon seeing my scholastic record, and when she noted that I had received A in English, A in German, and A in Latin, she immediately retreated.
It was not until my sophomore year that I met a former friend from elementary school, Lucy Bender. She had long curls, she was jaunty and loved pleasure—especially outside school. When she suggested we have a soda together, I eagerly complied. And I proceeded to play Follow the Leader for the next two years.
Lucy confided in me that she intended to become an actress and when she reached sixteen would leave school to go on the stage. Meanwhile, her behavior in class seemed designed to hasten her departure from school. Our botany course was attended by the majority of the baseball team and was presided over by one Miss Merchant, whose petticoats were much longer than her skirts. Passing around specimens of bean seeds and Indian nuts for the students to study, Miss Merchant saw Lucy open one of the jars, remove the contents, and begin to nibble at them. Near-sighted, Miss Merchant mistook me for Lucy. Immediately she wrote out a pink card: “Plays and keeps up a comotion almost daily.” I was to take the card, along w
ith a bean seed, to the principal’s office. Indignant, I grasped the card, read it aloud, and rebuked Miss Merchant: “Miss Merchant, you have misspelled the word commotion. It should have two m’s.” At this point Lucy rose and gallantly cried, “Let me go. I am the guilty one.” Now we were really partners in crime.
Lucy Bender was not fully appreciated in my home. Her Russian background did not appeal to my snobbish mother. It was our much loved housekeeper, Babette Sternecker, who found Fräulein Lucy “sehr amusant.”
Babette was an important personality in my domestic gallery, and to me she would become a mainstay for the next forty-five years. There had been nothing “amusant” about Babette’s life. Born in the small Bavarian town of Straubing, she had been early orphaned and assumed the care of her sister and brother. Before World War I she had been engaged to a young harness maker, who was killed in the First Battle of the Somme. Her sister died of peritonitis shortly after. At the close of the war, having lost their small capital, Babette and her brother, lured by newspaper promises of a rich orange grove near Rio de Janeiro, immigrated to Brazil. The “rich orange grove” was a desolate waste filled with poisonous snakes. Shortly after, Babette journeyed to the Bronx, where she lived briefly with an uncle who advised her to find work immediately. She placed an ad in the Staats-Zeitung, New York’s principal German-language newspaper.
My parents, in need of a cook-housekeeper, turned to the advertising pages of the Staats-Zeitung. Since my father was a German Herr Doktor, my mother advised him to interview Fräulein Sternecker. The result was inevitable. Babette made our home hers. When she stood in the kitchen she resembled a Madonna designed by Holbein or Weiditz for a German Book of Hours. At first of course she was lonely, but her loneliness was quickly dispelled when my brother brought home a stray puppy that had, like Babette, suffered from outrageous fortune. Soon Skeezie and Babette made each other whole. Babette respected the men of the house, A. Junior, now a Columbia premed student, was Herr Adolph to her, the inspiration for her Hasenpfeffer and cherry Strudel. I was always her Miss Leona. She loved me and she loved my dogs. And when Lucy came home with me after school, we could always feast on Babette’s kleines Gebäck—her special hazelnut cookies.
As she had predicted, Lucy abandoned high school at age sixteen. She did not land on stage precisely, but she did attach herself to the delightful comedienne Bea Lillie, who allowed her to stand in the wings of the Palace Theatre and hold props for her. As for me, Lucy’s departure left me quite desolate. Moreover, her antics and my own slavish devotion to them had played havoc with my scholastic career. There had been too many classes cut, too many Wednesday matinees, too many unprepared assignments. When I applied for entrance to Barnard College, I was turned down.
Madeleine IN FEBRUARY 1929 I JOINED the freshman class at Barnard College. My immediate reaction was despair. As a February freshman I was out of step with my colleagues, who, having matriculated the previous September, were now knowledgeable veterans. In addition, I had been cut off from my high school friends, now mostly attending either New York University or Hunter College, and I felt their absence keenly. As my father observed, “You cried when you thought you might not be accepted at Barnard, and now you are crying because you are there.” In time I adjusted, but it did take time. I philosophized with myself as I took the daily walk from Ninety-ninth Street near Riverside Drive up the broad streets of West End Avenue to Morningside Heights, The mile that led from comfortable, prosperous apartment houses to the purlieus of Columbia University on the one side and Barnard College on the other gave me a quiet, undisturbed background and just enough time for any necessary introspection.
During my first two years at Barnard I took the required courses except for freshman English, from which I was exempted. I continued writing verses, mostly sad ones. Contributing to my sadness was the fact that my old high school friends were not only at different colleges but had begun the process of pairing off.
Shirley, my junior high school companion, had fallen in love with an aesthetic young man named David, who balanced work in his father’s clothing business with amateur acting. He starred in The Valiant, a play based upon Shakespeare’s observation that “the valiant never taste of death but once.” To me, David seemed all soul, though he certainly made his physical presence felt. At the same time my high school friend Helen was pairing off with David’s friend Raymond—tall, handsome, graceful, and most enviable. I could not help feeling cut off, rather like the cheese that stands alone in the nursery rhyme. In a couple of years I would make use of that feeling and that nursery rhyme in my first published book.
But at that moment I expressed my state of mind and emotion in a convoluted letter to Helen. It is dated enigmatically “Monday—after sunset,” and it confides to her: “I hardly know what it’s all about—this thing called living. In some books I’ve been reading … I’ve gotten some new ideas. Norman Douglas, for example, in South Wind holds that life is really a very simple matter. The thing that makes it seem complex is the fact that we, considering ourselves quite significant, have established over us a deity. In my thinking, however, that is the one fact which seems an effort on the part of men to avoid complexity by ordaining the simple guidance of an overseeing companion—well, each in his own tongue.”
Mine seems to have loosened a bit when I added the following revealing paragraph: “As for my emotional state, again I say, nothing happens. The seething has spent itself a little—but the need within me to be a gypsy lover, to love and be loved, all sufficiently still cries, for I am young yet.”
In 1929, after completing one semester at Barnard, I spent my seventeenth summer at Richfield Springs, New York, a popular vacation spot. After my return home I wrote to Helen again, this time announcing that “I have grown enough to say I wish I had not grown. To make a short story shorter, in Richfield I met a man who seemed crazy about me. We took strolls at 1 o’clock in the morning, he kissed me in the park where it was dark save for the moon, he danced with me the ‘Merry Widow Waltz,’ and while we danced he sang to me, the exquisite words in French. I have not heard from him since I left the place—10 days ago … Needless to say, I have omitted many incidents which might aid in solving this riddle. He is a man, a 22-year-old boy. I could be mad about him. How I wish I could see him again! How happy I should be! … To love and be loved are, after all, what we are made for. It is better to be happy than to be interesting (Farewell adolescentia).”
My letter to Helen omitted one of the “incidents which might aid in solving this riddle.” One evening, dancing to the “Merry Widow,” I looked over his shoulder and saw nearby a radiantly beautiful young Spanish woman. I immediately called his attention to her and he soon began to pursue my “rival.” My lover disappeared from my life. I had been too honest, too frank, too forthright, too outspoken. In my letter I tried to romanticize him into a mysterious shadow. Growing, I learned, could be painful.
The girl who wished she had not grown, and was facing her farewell to adolescentia with some misgiving, would soon be catapulted into a degree of maturity. Outside, the Great Depression had begun—lines of apple sellers appeared on the streets; soup kitchens opened for other lines of needy; banks began to fail; Hoover, seemingly untouched, was ensconced in the White House. Then, on September 24, 1930, at eleven in the evening, after I had just returned from a date, my father died suddenly of his third stroke.
My father’s death was sudden but not unexpected. Handicapped by a major stroke, he had for several years lived a very quiet life at home. In 1930, when I was eighteen, he was seventy, and seemed very old to me. He took his condition with fortitude, but, in the way of young people, I was often embarrassed by it. On the night of September 24, I had been out with an attractive young man from the Virgin Islands who let me off at the house. I went upstairs. My parents were in bed but not asleep, and I began to tell them about the date with Albert. Then my mother and I saw my father go taut and heard a dreadful sound—the death rattle. It was over
almost before it began. And I had lost my father.
It happened too suddenly to be fully realized at first. I mourned his loss, but I coped with it. My loss could in no way be measured against my mother’s. I had lost the father who took a little girl sledding. She had lost her companion of thirty years. One of my mother’s first acts after my father’s death was to throw his letters away. She wanted no inquisitive eyes interpreting her love. My immediate and persistent reaction was gratitude that it was not my mother who had died. I knew I could not have borne her loss. I did bear my father’s. It was only while setting the table for two instead of three, or looking hastily at the cushion on the living room sofa where he had habitually sat, that I missed him acutely, and one night I thought I saw him seated in my room. It seemed natural now that my mother and I should turn spontaneously to each other and become even closer.
At no time was it ever suggested that I leave college. In any event, work would have been impossible to find, and my parents had seen to it that funds were set aside for my education. One way of enunciating a farewell to my adolescence, and perhaps eventually of finding work, seemed to be intensive study, and by 1931 I had matured sufficiently to embark upon Barnard’s Honors course in English literature.
That program was designed for me. It demanded no attendance at any classes, no tests, no term papers—only the supervision of an adviser from time to time. Not until graduation would I be required to prove my mettle. Meanwhile, I could sit in on any courses I wished, pursue my research and reading, consult my mentors when I desired to do so, think, produce, study—all on my own. And so I heard my old Professor Hoxie Fairchild lecture on Hamlet, and the drama specialist Minor White Latham discuss the conventions of the medieval stage. I listened as Charles Baldwin reincarnated Chaucer and as William Haller intoned John Milton. All of English literature spread out before me—a fertile field for me to wander. I spent hours at the Barnard and Columbia libraries and more hours at the New York Public Library. The Forty-second Street building was open in those days until 10 P.M., and I frequently sent slips in for books at 9:30, just to have a glance at them and reserve them till the next day. Barnard had given me a feast for my devouring, and I found myself ravenous, at last tasting the heady delights of intellectual independence, not a substitute for love, but another love altogether.
Old Books, Rare Friends Page 4
